Re: Life begins to copy GZG.....

There's been a spate of articles on this subject (in the Financial
Times) over the last few days, and on the back of that I had a look
around and found the following article: 

http://www.caat.org.uk/research/Mercenaries_Body.html 

Very (on foot of our ramblings about what counts as a mercenary)
interesting is this passage: 

"The Angolan government put their captives on trial for mercenarism, but
no such crime was then recognised in international law. Several attempts
were made to fill this gap: Article 47 of the 1977 Additional Protocols
of the Geneva Conventions...Article 47, which was never ratified by
France or US, piles up so many criteria for the identification of
mercenaries that it is legally unusable. As one authority has remarked,
‘any mercenary who cannot exclude himself from this definition deserves
to be shot – and his lawyer with him’"